The Best Investment You Can Make in Your Home? We think so!
We are on a serious pleasure kick here at jennifer. Given all the things pleasure does for us—boosting health, relieving stress, firing up a lust for life, and increasing our capacity for nearly everything—it’s no wonder why.
And there’s no better place for calling in pleasure than your home. We have done the research, read the articles, consulted Google, and tested the results in our homes to bring you our five tips for creating a relaxing, healing, rejuvenating, and gorgeous pleasure-centered home.
Invest in Art You Love
A study out of Norway found that looking at art improves your feelings of satisfaction with life. Not that we need a study to tell us this, right? We can literally feel it in our bodies. Imagine yourself being surrounded by beauty. Go ahead, close your eyes and try it. That dopamine hit is lovely.
Artist, and friend of jennifer, Melanie Biehle, channels that feeling into her abstract paintings. In our 2020 interview with her, she explained, “Ultimately, my abstract paintings are emotion. Each one is uniquely created to bring a particular type of energy to the spaces they occupy. Seaside color palettes can relax and calm; bold and bright abstract cityscapes can enliven and energize. Everyone can have their own unique experience with the paintings.”
Layer in Sensory Moments
Of all our senses, smell is the most powerful in shaping how we feel. Our nose is a mainline to where emotions live in our brain. It’s why young people steal the sweatshirts of their beloved, why we call the peels of an orange or lemon zest, and why you get that feeling you do when you smell a specific scent. So go in on a scent-sory experience for your home.
Please Your Body
Your most important home is your body, and you should feel safe and connected with it. It also means you should nourish it with love. How does this tie in with the more conventional idea of home? Stock your kitchen with nourishing foods that also look beautiful like fresh fruits and vegetables, brew aromatic tisanes to sip throughout the day, create a mini oasis full of things that help you stay present and connected, and create spaces where your body can move in ways that feel good. For us, that means being able to have space for pilates and dance.
Green Up Your Space
People who spend 5 to 10 minutes in a room with at least a few plants feel better than those who don’t. Increase that time to 15 minutes in a room, and increase the size of the plant from small to tall and you feel more peaceful and positive. Even the air you breathe while you're in a room with plants is more cleansing.
Shift Your Mindset
It’s hard to experience pleasure if you don’t feel worthy or safe enough to express and enjoy yourself, your longings, desires, and dreams. Maybe you grew up in an environment that didn’t nurture self-expression, or you were conditioned to see absolute sacrifice as a form of goodness, or you learned that safety comes through hiding parts or all of yourself. Or maybe you have people in your life now who do that still. So while you can easily hang a piece of art, light a candle, put a plant in a room, stock your fridge with good food, none of it will help you embody pleasure until you have a space to messily work through a bunch of harmful messaging heaped on you, whether about not being enough, or being too much. You can do this through journaling, therapy, or joining a supportive community focused on collective care.
There are many ways to experience pleasure and I hope you have the space to explore it. After all, pleasure is personal. Deeply so. It’s powerful too; enough to light the way forward.
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